After a busy summer I think it is absolutely necessary to summarize the latest updates in the Java Portal space.

From the commercial side, major players are:

Oracle WebLogic Portal:The current release is still WLP 10g3 but soon we expect the first 11g release with codename "Sunshine".Major improvements are- JSR-286 compliance (Portlet 2.0)- WSRP 2.0 support (Event based coordination, IPC for remote portlets, resource serving)- Full interoperability with WebCenter in both directions- Improved Ajax support- VCR Direct SPI Support for UCM- Even more REST APIs to access portal informations- New REST API to access Unified User Profile data- First support of the new Content Management Standard driven by Oasis: CMIS- Apache Beehive still supported but not enhanced- Replacement of Autonomy Search Engine by SES

Adobe: Adobe? Yes... Since the new release of Adobe ColdFusion 9, there is a new portal player to be considered when it comes to interoperability based on JSR-168/286 portlets. ColdFusion 9 is now fully compliant with the Portlet Containers from the Java world.

Open Source portals that have the most promising potential at the moment are:

JBoss Portal and eXo Portal have been merged!

This latest interesting announcement has been made official on Sep 3rd at the JBoss World in Chicago. eXo has fully committed its entire open source portal stack to Red Hat’s newly introduced GateIn portal project extending it with cutting-edge collaboration features as well as document and content management features.

Jetspeed 2.2.0: After quite a long time without updates a new version has been released (summer 2009) that is fully JSR-286 compliant! The new version comes along with quite a bunch of updated documentation pages... So it would be worth to have a look at it again. Download it here.

Java EE 6: The JSR-316 has reached Proposed Final Draft. The hot discussions between JSR-299 vs JSR-330 have finally found a common resolution and both will be part of EE6 where JSR-299 will be based on the dependency injection specification defined by JSR-330.

Oracle has still not acquired SUN : The OK from EMEA is still pending.

JSF 2.0 : Mojarra 2.0, the production-quality, reference implementation for JSF 2.0 is out! This will of course be part of GlassFish v3 (final release planned for Dec-12th 2009) but you can grab the bits right now for your first dirty hands-on experience!

Geek Food: I discovered mainly two new things that I found diserve a Geek award:- Prezi ! Forget PPT and Google Presentations... Old school!- Play ! Clean alternative to develop JavaEE apps based on RESTful architectures.

Google Wave: I finally got an account (thanks a lot J. !!) but up to now I'm rather disappointed... nonetheless, the full features are not released yet, so I'm ready to get blown away. If you are interested, I still have some invitations left :-) Start your wave!

JavaOne 2010 : ... no, still no signs whether there will be a next JavaOne :-(